When this book was first published, in British hardback, the text ended at the close of the previous chapter. I had considered and dismissed the idea of adding what I am now about to write: an attempt to explain how and why Bobby and Jon came to kill James Bulger.
There had been a deluge of spurious, worthless theorising about their motives in the media and I did not feel inclined to add my own twopennyworth; I felt that all the clues, as many as were known, were already in the text. It only required a little intellectual effort on the part of the reader to piece them all together. Then I wondered if it was my own intellectual rigour that was lacking here. I had spent an unhealthily large proportion of the last 18 months turning the facts of the killing over and over in my head, trying to analyse and clarify what had happened. I had been increasingly infuriated by public and governmental response to the case. I had also had a baby, which would be irrelevant, except that it had been the constant refrain of parents while I was writing the book that I would ‘feel differently’ when I became a parent myself. They meant that I would identify my own baby with James Bulger and myself with Ralph and Denise and be unable to sympathise or even empathise with Bobby and Jon and their parents. Well, now I’d had a baby and did not ‘feel differently’ at all. Perhaps it was time to commit those thought-findings to paper …
David James Smith
We do not know if Bobby and Jon had planned to abduct and kill a baby but it seems to have become fixed in popular opinion, conveniently suiting the theory of the boys’ innate evil, that they had hatched a diabolical plot together and always knew exactly what their mutual intentions were.
‘Do you want to be in our gang – we’re going to kill someone,’ they told a schoolmate. Jon, in his police interviews, said it was Bobby who had proposed getting Mrs Power’s son lost so that he would walk into the road and get knocked over and, again said, it was Bobby who proposed pushing James into the water at the canal.
Irrespective of whether Jon is attributing his own words to Bobby, these sound to be condemning remarks. Perhaps, however, they are more hyperbolical than diabolical; the boastful, let’s-talk-tough exaggerations of children rather than an expressed intention.
It’s common enough, among adults, to talk big and threatening, without anyone seriously expecting the threat to be carried out. How often are children warned by their parents, in moments of impatience, ‘you do that again and I’ll kill you’?
Jon’s mother, Susan Venables, tells Jon in the middle of his interviews, in front of two police officers, that she would have ‘strangled’ him if she had known he was in the Strand. Of course, no one imagines she would have throttled Jon; it’s just a figure of speech. Perhaps a common one for Mrs Venables and almost certainly a common one for Bobby’s mother, Ann Thompson and Bobby’s older brothers.
Still, there was a degree of intent. Jon was identified as one of two boys tapping on a shop window to attract a child at the end of January. Their school attendance records showed that Bobby and Jon truanted together at this time. Then, in the hours before they took James, they attempted to lure another child, Mrs Power’s son.
The boys roamed around the Strand for most of the morning and half the afternoon making mischief. They stole from shops, begged for 20 pence, cheeked assistants and taunted an elderly woman. They did not act with the singular purpose of abducting a child. Perhaps they had an eye to the opportunity that finally presented itself with James, wandering momentarily from his mother’s care.
It does not, then, seem to have been much of a plan and, in this context, it is hard to accept that they knew they were going to go on and kill a child. One of the two boys must have first introduced the idea that led to taking James and he would certainly not have used the word ‘abduct’. ‘Let’s get a kid … let’s get a kid lost …’ It probably did not go much further than that to begin with.
On the face of it, Bobby, with a point of reference in his own brother, baby Ben, is more likely to have initiated the plan and it would be neat and tidy to conclude that, say, for reasons of jealousy, Bobby did to James what he really wanted to do to Ben. But a vulnerable child – James – can, of course, represent much more than a stand-in sibling. Above all, to two ten-year-olds, a child is a person over whom they can have power. I believe that the need to exert that power lies at the heart of the case.
Whether it was Bobby or Jon who proposed taking a child, it was Jon who apparently took the lead, tapping on the window in late January, beckoning Mrs Power’s son, approaching James and taking him by the hand as the trio left the Strand.
Merseyside Police believed that Bobby cunningly stood back and encouraged Jon to take the principal role. It was Bobby, by general consensus, who was the manipulative and sadistic ringleader in the whole affair. But how much deviousness can you attribute to a ten-year-old, even one with Bobby’s native acuity? There seems to be a disturbing readiness to ascribe adult guile and malice to Bobby. It may well be that Jon repeatedly took control because he wanted to.
Once out of the Strand with James the boys quickly sought the seclusion of the neighbouring canal towpath and it is not difficult to imagine their surprise, excitement even, at having ‘got away with it’, and their uncertainty over what to do next. We don’t know how serious was the intent when they talked about pushing James into the canal, and then there was a sudden escalation, the first act of violence. One of them – each says it was the other – picked James up and dropped him head-first onto the concrete path.
It might have ended here, when Bobby and Jon then ran off, but they went back, perhaps to have a look at James, and found him coming along towards them. They pulled the hood of his anorak up to cover the head injury and set off to … well, to where? It was not as if they went straight to the railway line or even followed a direct route. They dawdled and meandered and it is hardly in keeping with Bobby’s supposed cunning that they made their way to Walton, which both boys knew and where both, especially Bobby, were known; their final destination, the railway line, was just a few hundred yards from Bobby’s home.
Perhaps they were waiting for the cover of darkness before carrying out their attack on James or, perhaps, they didn’t really know what to do or where to go. A proper, artfully conceived plan would not have involved so much casual idling, messing around and wandering in and out of shops, nor offered so many opportunities to be caught in their encounters with adults. It might be stretching credulity to suggest that the boys wanted to be stopped and discovered but they certainly did not go to enormous lengths to avoid it. Of course, they lied when confronted, as children commonly do when caught out doing something wrong. Again, it is worth pointing out that Jon seems to have taken the lead in the significant exchanges.
James’s fate may still not have been decided when the boys stood at the end of the entry on Walton Lane – and James was seen alive for the last time. The police station is directly opposite, across the road, and the boys were observed apparently trying to push James into the road. Just possibly, they were trying to send him off to the police station. Equally, on this busy dual-carriageway, they may have been trying to get him run over. Either way, their lingering presence here and the act of pushing James off the pavement do not suggest they had already decided to drag the child on to the railway line and attack him.
Violence had been a part of James’s ordeal since his injury at the canal. Bobby had been seen to kick him. Jon admitted in interview that he had punched James while they were on the reservoir and tore the hood from his anorak when they were walking down the entry between City Road and Walton Lane.
By degrees, James’s presence in their company and in their power had become a part – almost a ‘normal’ part – of Bobby and Jon’s experience that afternoon. They had taken a boy and not been caught, they had been violent and not been stopped. James could do nothing. He was powerless. The boys, by now, could do anything with him.
The attack on the railway line began with a casual flick of a tin of paint and escalated quickly into a very violent assault. We do not know exactly what happened or what part each boy played in the attack. My belief, which I will explain, is that Jon was responsible for the worst of the assault, though Bobby was no bystander. I imagine a great deal of nervous and exciting tension between them. Laughter, fear, aggression, anger, viciousness. The attack, once it had begun, was unstoppable.
They probably did not need to egg each other on. The experience of the afternoon and their presence together at that moment was enough. One of the boys, quite possibly both, wanted – I would even say ‘needed’ – to sexually assault James and this became a feature of the attack. Finally, they moved the body across the tracks and covered it with bricks. It was an obvious, but feeble, attempt to disguise the killing.
Within the hour both boys were back in their mothers’ arms, Jon being verbally and physically attacked by Susan Venables for his disobedience at playing truant, Bobby sending Ann Thompson into a rage at Susan Venables by complaining that she had hit him. Both parents were oblivious to their sons’ recent murder of a two-year-old boy. Both boys were immediately back in their more familiar role as victims rather than victimisers.
*
Nothing will ever persuade me that Bobby and Jon were born to kill James Bulger. The idea that there are people who do evil simply because they are evil has its ancient root in bigotry and intolerance. It’s the kind of attitude that got ‘witches’ burnt and it remains a convenient, comforting means of explaining away and distancing ourselves from an event – such as the killing of a child by children.
By definition, children have been granted a special place in the history of evil and original sin. They have natural tendencies towards wickedness and need to be beaten into line. Don’t do as I do, do as I tell you. I suspect that an authoritarian, repressive, affectionless approach to parenting has been responsible for producing generations of damaged children and, in its darker corners, has allowed terrible excesses of physical and sexual abuse. In turn, damaged children grow up to be parents and inflict further damage.
It used to be thought that infants and children had short memories and would not remember as adults what had happened to them at the beginning of their lives. This may be true at a conscious level but it is also apparent that they have powerful feelings. Babies, in their innocence, have primary needs and responses. They want food, love and security to thrive. A baby that is not fed when it is hungry cries and becomes agitated. If the hunger continues to be unsatisfied it becomes anxious, enraged and humiliated because it is being neglected and is powerless to do anything about it. A parent, or carer, who shouts and hits the baby to try and stop the ‘fit’ will make the baby feel even more resentful. The baby will eventually be fed, and the traumatic feelings, which of course the baby can’t identify, will be suppressed and stored up in the unconscious because they are too painful to live with, and get in the way of the overwhelming need to love and be loved.
The potential traumas of babies and children are many and varied, from the unsatisfied needs of hunger to the extremes of physical and sexual assault. Each person will experience a trauma differently – but the worse the trauma the more extreme the later reaction to it is likely to be, up to and including killing yourself or somebody else.
This is not an exact science, but then neither is the theory of innate evil. What did the British media call Bobby and Jon? Devils, demons, monsters … it sounds like superstitious nonsense.
There have been few empirical attempts to prove a link between childhood trauma and subsequent violent offending and some inconclusive studies to establish the causes of delinquency. In Britain the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, a so-called longitudinal examination of a group of urban, working-class boys, has suggested that delinquents are more likely to emerge from large families where discipline is strict or inconsistent and the parents passive or rejecting. Intriguingly, the study also indicated that while the loss of a parent was important, it was only so in cases where there had been parental conflict. In other words, broken homes without parental conflict were not a significant predictor of delinquency and unbroken homes with parental conflict were more likely to lead to delinquency.
Current right-wing political opinion in Britain cites the ‘collapse of the nuclear family as a primary cause of the rise in juvenile crime, perhaps because it deflects attention from the more obvious problem of a widening gap between rich and poor and the growing number of people living in poverty.
Certainly, families are vulnerable to the stresses and strains of low income and poor housing. The bigger the family the more extreme the hardship. The harder it gets the more likely parents are to take it out on their children. Not all parents of low-income families and not just poor parents of low-income families will abuse their offspring. But it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the pressure of poverty in the family takes an extra toll on its children.
Liverpool’s past is characterised by extremes of poverty. I was struck by the symbolically brutal scene (at the beginning of Chapter 23) of a group of adults laughing at the spectacle of children with their hands bound, fighting in the mud to catch a cock between their teeth. I though of the ‘ragged street urchins’ of the Victorian age, neglected and unloved. I wondered if it was more than mere coincidence that three of the past cases of killings by children, documented at the beginning of the book, had occurred on Merseyside.
As a character in a recent American novel says, ‘It’s the cycle of shit’ (Clockers by Richard Price).
*
Imagine the terrible moment when Jon admits to his parents, ‘I did kill him.’ Not ‘We did …’, not ‘Bobby did …’, but ‘I did …’ Susan and Neil must by now suspect what is coming. Jon’s burden, as is evident from his distress, is unbearable. The catharsis comes when Susan and Neil tell him, as they have been advised to do, that they will always love him. It is the trigger for the enormous emotional release of Jon’s guilt.
Is it possible that the potency of those words – the expression of ‘love’ – was not just a result of Jon’s need to hear them then, when the desire to confess had become overwhelming? Is it also possible that he had not heard them very often in the past and had doubted, or at least not always been sure of, his parents’ love?
We don’t know everything, or even very much, about Jon’s childhood, but what we do know indicates that it was characterised by instability.
His parents first separated when he was four and were later divorced. Jon went with his mother and his brother and sister to stay at his grandmother’s home. Then he moved with his mother into their own home for a short period, before they all moved back in with Neil. The parents separated again, Jon again going with his mother. Sometimes his father would come to stay, then he didn’t see them very much at all for a while. Then they all began living together again for part of the week. We know that Jon’s mother would sometimes send Jon to stay with his father when she couldn’t cope. We know from the NSPCC case conference that Neil looked after Jon then sent him back to Susan because he couldn’t cope.
Jon was ‘upset and difficult’ following the initial separation, and his increasingly disturbed behaviour is a clue to the feelings of confusion, insecurity and rejection aroused in him by this continuing upheaval and uncertainty. The violence and aggression he displayed at school and at home also suggest a build-up of frustration, resentment and anger.
We can only guess at the domestic conflict behind Neil and Susan’s volatile relationship, but it must have been aggravated by Neil’s unemployment and the special needs, first, of brother Mark and later, of sister Michelle. Being a child witness to such conflict would be distressing enough. Being a victim of it, in the stress-provoked way that Susan seems to have shouted at Jon and smacked him, could only have reinforced the impotent, powerless frustration of Jon’s position.
Susan, who does not give much away, describes her upbringing as strict and disciplined. This almost certainly means the use of harsh physical punishment and, if we are looking for the root of her depressive illness, it may lie in her own childhood experience and feelings of inadequacy as an adult parent and partner.
Neil describes a happy, spoilt upbringing, despite the loss of his mother at an early age. He too has had problems with depression as an adult and there is a sense of his passive incapacity as a parent: his inability to cope with Jon, his belief that Jon being bullied is ‘just part of growing up’. Even though he was living less than ten minutes’ drive from Susan there was a period – a critical period in Jon’s worsening behaviour – when he ‘wasn’t seeing much’ of his family.
There are three small indicators of Jon’s hostile attitude towards his father. Two occur during the police interviews after Jon’s confession, when Neil has stepped in to replace Susan. Neil evidently takes a sip of water from a cup on the table. ‘That’s mine,’ says Jon. The interviewing officer tells Jon to let his dad take a drink from the cup: ‘I think he might just need one.’ Later, when Jon is being questioned about the possibility of a sexual assault on James, he turns to hit his father. Jon says it’s because ‘me dad thinks I know and I don’t’. He says he wants his mum. The third and final incident was back at Jon’s secure unit after the first day of the trial when he shouted at his father.
Neil, with his own vulnerability and passivity, is perhaps unconsciously passing on those qualities to Jon: an inconsistent and fragile father figure who is adding to his son’s feelings of powerless frustration.
After instability, another theme that emerges from what we know of Jon’s background is a tragic tendency to denial and suppression of reality. The instinct, even before the killing, to make everything seem all right, or at least, not as bad as it appears, is so strong that it is tempting to speculate that there is something lurking in a dark corner that is too big and too difficult to confront.
In their meeting with the consultant psychiatrist, Dr Susan Bailey, Neil and Susan said they had dealt with their separation by telling Jon that they could not get on together but were still friends. They said that Neil had continued to see all the children. The implication was that everything was all right, when we know that it wasn’t.
At the time, and in her talk with Dr Bailey, Susan seems to have been keen to find an external explanation for Jon’s behavioural problems. Jon was simply an overactive boy who was bullied. He did not show any antagonism towards his siblings or jealousy of their special needs attention.
We know that Jon was not placated by his parents’ explanation of their separation and that he was ‘upset and difficult’, began having temper tantrums and showed some anti-social behaviour in school. This was around the time that the police were called to Susan’s home because the children had been left alone for three hours.
Jon did complain of being bullied, at school and in the street near his mother’s home, and this can only have added to his vulnerability and powerless frustration.
When he was seven years old Jon was referred to a trainee educational psychologist who said that Jon seemed unable to cope with the pressures on him. Nothing seems to have changed as a result of this diagnosis. No help was forthcoming and there was continuing instability in the family. The ‘pressure’ must have risen inside Jon.
His class teacher noticed a dramatic deterioration in Jon’s behaviour after the 1990 Christmas holidays. Did something happen during that holiday to make him so much worse? Now he begins to act out very serious internal distress, showing aggression and self-destructiveness. The consensus is that he is seeking attention. He wants attention.
His worsening behaviour – we know it is extreme because his teacher has never seen anything like it in 14 years of teaching – results in a second visit to a psychologist. Susan proposes another (denying) explanation for what she calls Jon’s hyperactivity: his diet. The psychologist colludes in Susan’s denial and suggests a special diet, as well as a referral to a senior colleague.
Susan tries the diet but gives up because it doesn’t seem to make any difference. She does not pursue the referral. Does she give up because she does not think the problem is very serious – he’ll grow out of it – or because she is afraid of the truth and finds it easier to deny?
When Jon finally nearly chokes a boy with a ruler – using such enraged strength it takes two adults to separate him from his victim – Susan attributes this to the bullying and decides he should change schools. The very action that draws him to Bobby.
All agree that Jon’s behaviour improves under the more disciplined methods of his first teacher at his new school in Walton. He still butts his head against the wall in the playground, but not very often, and only the dinner lady seems concerned about this. The head teacher just wants Jon to ‘behave himself’ in her school and has only accepted him on the basis that he goes into a class below his proper age group – another humiliation for Jon to take on board.
Where are Jon’s feelings in the ‘structured environment’ of his new, disciplined teaching? They cannot now be expressed in his behaviour and they cannot disappear. They can only be suppressed where they will fester. He has probably already been made to feel guilty for all the trouble he has been causing his mother. He wants to please her because he wants to be loved. He is a child and what is happening to him is not his fault, but he is being asked to carry the additional burden of responsibility.
Jon’s mother notes that he seems happier playing with younger children in the street. A teacher finds him in the playground, picking on a smaller boy. He and Bobby, when they get together, enjoy a reputation for bullying. Here is Jon, vulnerable and powerless, taking opportunities to reclaim some power, and project his vulnerability and powerlessness onto somebody else.
Susan leaves Jon to make his own way to school and he begins to truant. In the new school year, with a less strict teacher, his behaviour again starts to degenerate. The teacher thinks Jon knows he is doing wrong but carries on as if he doesn’t care and wants the attention. There is no uniformity of opinion about Jon among the staff. The head thinks he is ‘odd’. Only the dinner lady and one teacher appear to think that there is a real problem. The truanting continues.
With the benefit of hindsight it is possible to say that, short of writing it out in big letters on the school blackboard, Jon could not have made himself plainer. If he was not helped he was going to do something really terrible. At some point, probably sooner rather than later, he would find an outlet for all that suppressed rage and powerless frustration. He would find someone vulnerable over whom he could exert absolute power. He would be abusive and very violent. It was becoming a matter of urgency.
When four detectives knocked on Susan Venables’ door to arrest her son for murder she said, ‘I knew you’d be here. I told him you’d want to see him for sagging school on Friday.’ Sadly, tragically, I believe that, deep down, even then, Susan knew the real reason for the detectives’ visit. Denial is a difficult habit to break.
*
If it was instability that characterised Jon’s childhood, it was turbulence that defined Bobby’s. Conflict and violence were an inbuilt part of life in the Thompson household. We probably don’t know the half of what Bobby witnessed or was subjected to, but what we do know provides a vivid picture of a classically dysfunctional family.
His mother, Ann – like Jon, a middle child – was ill-prepared for an adult life as parent and partner. Her own childhood was dominated by the terror and tyranny of a drunken, physically abusive father and a mother who seemed to Ann to be passive, weak and unsupporting.
Who knows what historical cycle had led Ann’s parents – Bobby’s maternal grandparents – to play these roles or why it was Ann alone, of the three children, who felt victimised and unloved. Middle children, sandwiched between the first-born and an adored baby, can often feel isolated as the family scapegoat.
If you are denied love and affection as a child how can you express those feelings as an adult? What else could Ann do with those unsatisfied needs but, unconsciously, develop a store of resentment and anger behind a wall of truculent self- protection? Treated as if she was worthless, Ann would inevitably come to believe it. She could not live with feeling worthless, so she buried the feeling, and created a mask of aggressive defiance.
No wonder then, that she married the ‘first fella who ever paid her attention’. Engaged on her seventeenth birthday, married on her eighteenth, she could not get away from home quick enough and was almost bound to step out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Her father’s beating had continued, apparently unabated, into adolescence. There is something almost sexual in her father’s humiliating violation of Ann’s body, the beating of a teenaged daughter by a father who has just been told she is leaving him to get married.
Ann did not leave her parents’ home to get married and start a family, or because she was ready. She left because she needed to. There was no hope of fulfilling the wishful, escapist fantasy she had played out with dolls. There could be no ‘fairytale’ marriage.
Little is known of her husband, Bobby senior, but from what we do know, the parallel between his own childhood and that of his son Bobby is extraordinary. Bobby senior, the third youngest like his son, lost his own father – through death rather than desertion – in childhood. ‘The paternal role had been taken on by the elder brothers, and they were strict in imposing discipline.’ This is so exact it could be a prophecy. Another turn of the cycle.
As a married couple, Ann and Bobby senior seem, initially, to have been permanently broke and unhappy. Why did they have so many children? Ann says she kept on trying for a girl and her husband wanted a football team. Perhaps the truth is that Ann wanted, or needed, the doll-like innocence of babies. A need that could never be satisfied and could only be disastrous for the children.
It is no surprise that Bobby senior turns out to be a violent drunk like Ann’s father. Bobby senior, deprived of a father and subjugated to the will of his older siblings, is now in a position of power which he is only too ready to abuse.
What a good laugh it must have been among Ann and her sons, joking about Bobby senior’s similarities with Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. What must the family have experienced to make that joke acceptable?
By the time little Bobby is born the family is already in trouble, Bobby senior is violent with his wife and his sons. It is difficult to believe that Ann does not employ physical punishment nor sometimes fight back at her husband. There is probably a great deal of abusive shouting and verbal conflict. There is probably very little show of love and tenderness and certainly no consistency.
The eldest boy, David, has been on and off the child protection register. Ann has attempted suicide with an overdose of Valium, not long after the birth of her fourth child. They probably thought she was suffering from post-natal depression. Don’t worry, love, you’ll get over it. How many truckloads of Valium would it take to dull Ann’s pain? She would not expect to be helped and no help, or not very much, is forthcoming.
Ironically, family life begins to improve after the birth of little Bobby. There is more money and camping holidays. Nothing has been confronted or resolved and the construct must still be dangerously fragile but, perhaps, there is a little less pressure and conflict.
Bobby is just about two years old when his younger brother Ryan is born and he is no longer the new baby in the family. He is six years old when his father leaves and ceases all contact with Ann and the boys. (Is it possible Bobby senior was six when his father died?)
First Bobby has been displaced in the family by Ryan – at the very age of James Bulger when he is killed – and now he has been abandoned by his father. The little love and affection the family has to spare has perhaps been invested in the newborn. This was withdrawn from Bobby when Ryan came along and now his father, by his actions, is saying, ‘I don’t want you, I don’t love you.’
The effect on the whole family of the father’s departure is catastrophic. First, symbolically, the family home immediately burns down. Then Ann turns to drink, confirmed now in her role as a victim, and, unsurprisingly, incapable of being one adequate parent, never mind two.
Bobby, like his father before him, is now left to the mercies of his older brothers. The experience of conflict and violence – the deliberate and unintentional abuse of adult power – is their only model. What else can they do, when suddenly and prematurely awarded the power for themselves, but act out the same conflict and violence? We don’t know what went on, while Ann was in the pub and Bobby senior was God knows where, but, at best, it was probably bullying and, at worst, it may have reached into those dark corners of excessive abuse.
At home, Ann was almost certainly short-tempered, unaffectionate and harsh. Bobby must have responded to her as a victim, wanting to please and protect his mother. He must have felt resentment too, that she was not there to protect him. He would have suppressed those feelings and perhaps projected them onto his father, who was now a convenient focus for all the anger in the family.
Bobby will also have taken on his mother’s protective shell of defiance: those instincts for self-preservation that were to serve him so well in his interviews with the police and to see him wrongly perceived as the leader of the plot to kill James Bulger.
By the time Ann emerges from her alcoholic stupor, the family is in total disarray. One by one, the boys are heading into care. There is delinquency, depression and attempts at suicide (overdoses, just like Ann – another cycle).
The turbulence and confusion of Bobby’s childhood could not be worse. Ann becomes pregnant and a new baby, Ben, is born. Bobby helps to feed and change the baby, perhaps enjoys helping his mother, wanting to please her. He bakes cakes in the kitchen too. It is as if he is trying to provoke some love and affection from Ann. Or, at least, some consistency in her mothering.
We know from the teachers at school in Walton that Ryan complains of being bullied by Bobby. Yet, in bed, at night they turn to each other for security, each sucking the other’s thumb. It is no wonder that Bobby feels insecure or that he needs someone to bully.
At school, no one sees a troubled child. Bobby – another Thompson in that long line of truants, bullies and general miscreants – has expectations to fulfil and does not disappoint. His protective shell, surely only reinforced by these expectations, is misinterpreted as the demeanour of a child causing trouble. Like Jon, he is kept back in a class a year below his age group.
Neglected, resentful, betrayed by his father, bullied by his brothers, reminded at school of his poor pedigree and ‘bad’ behaviour, Bobby has no support.
He truants and goes shoplifting. He steals things and throws them away. He is self-destructive because he doesn’t know any better and no one is there to make sense of it for him. He has reserves of anger and resentment and unsatisfied needs. He has experienced abuse of power and will one day impose his own power to abuse. Now there is no sign, other than bullying Ryan, of any urgent impulse to violence. But when the opportunity is created he will take it. With Jon he finds and makes that opportunity.
Is it possible that Jon and Bobby found each other because they were the two unhappiest and most mistreated boys in the school? Perhaps they saw something of themselves in each other. Perhaps, unconsciously, Bobby identified Jon’s readiness to go to extremes.
Jon was isolated at school by his temper tantrums and uncontrollable behaviour, while Bobby was isolated by his distinction as a Thompson, with all the baggage that entailed. They were united in the humiliation of being kept down a year. Another humiliation was the last thing either boy needed.
In all likelihood, if Bobby and Jon had not got together James Bulger would not have been killed. It is difficult to imagine either boy carrying out the killing alone. I believe they needed each other’s presence to bolster their nerve and maintain the ‘normality’ that permitted the escalation into violence. It is equally unlikely that there were other pupils in the school who were so badly damaged that they would want, or need, to participate in the abduction and murder of a child.
*
Many people, I know, are reluctant to accept this kind of explanation for a seemingly inexplicable, inexcusable act of such horrific violence. The will to try and understand such a crime sometimes appears to be less important than the need to find someone or something to blame. This is a kind of displacement. The crime is so extreme and so unpleasant that it must be placed beyond all human boundaries. What will we have to address in ourselves if we seek to make a link between such violence and childhood experience which, to a lesser or greater extent, is part of all our childhoods?
Indeed, the usual response to this kind of analysis, repeated over and over in the aftermath of the Bulger case, is that lots of people have difficult childhoods and they don’t all go out and kill someone. Specifically, Jon and Bobby were no worse off than lots of other children and must therefore have been driven by their innate evil.
I can only ask how many of those other children will go on to live out the disturbances of their childhood in one way or another? Delinquency, depression, suicide, domestic violence … I’m sure a definitive list would be much longer. You could not predict that any other boy, given Jon or Bobby’s upbringing, would go out and kill a child. You could, however, predict that those boys would, at some point, be likely to suffer, or cause someone else to suffer, unless help was forthcoming.
It is also possible that Bobby and Jon were worse off than lots of other children, that because we do not know the full facts of their childhoods we do not know just how much they were asked to endure. Quite possibly, for example (though there is no evidence to support this), the sexual assault of James was repeated or acted out from Jon and/or Bobby’s own experience as the victim(s) of sexual abuse.
To follow my own argument through to its conclusion, almost everything that has happened to Bobby and Jon since they killed James Bulger could be seen in the context of continuing humiliation and abuse of adult power. Their unconscious cries for help have remained unheard, except perhaps at close-quarters, in their secure units among caring staff.
It was not, in this case, just a question of apportioning blame. The guilty parties – two small boys – had to be paraded at a trial and marched through streets of newsprint. It was not, as some people have thought, the boys’ lawyers who put them through this ordeal – it was the judicial process. A process which was rather like a public execution: the crowd was happy to see them drop but went home with a rather sour taste in its mouth.
Justice had to be seen to be done, and rightly so, but, with the boys so young and not yet grown, did it have to be quite so brutal? Wouldn’t an informal hearing, which spent more than 20 minutes examining the boys’ backgrounds and mental condition, have been better?
Was it also necessary to appropriate the boys’ actions as a platform for such a variety of zealous moral crusades? Wicked boys, bad mothers, lone mothers, soft teachers, wet liberals, mollycoddled perpetrators of crime, ignored victims of crime and, most popularly, violent videos …
The closing remarks of the trial judge, voicing his, evidentially unfounded, suspicion that violent videos might have played a part in inciting Bobby and Jon to murder incited, in turn, an enthusiastic debate in the media. Child’s Play 3 received more free publicity than it, aesthetically, deserved.
This successfully diverted attention from what might have been a more profitable discussion about child abuse and the pressures on low-income families. And even though there was only the slightest evidence that one of the boys – Jon – might have seen a violent video – Child’s Play 3 – and even though it was difficult to see what this had to do with James Bulger’s murder, the debate rumbled along, found its way into academia and prompted the publication of a ‘discussion paper’. This too received more publicity than it deserved.
‘Video Violence and the Protection of Children’ was written by Elizabeth Newson from the Child Development Research Unit at Nottingham University, and was endorsed by a bewilderingly large number of ‘psychologists, psychiatrists, paediatricians and others’.
The paper made a direct link with the Bulger case and, in the course of a preamble, stated that we should ‘try to ensure that Jamie (sic) is not just the first of many such victims’. It went on …
However, child abuse, poverty and neglect have been a part of many children’s experience over the years: indeed, although neither Jon nor Robert could be said to have come from happy and nurturant homes, there was little evidence of the extremes of neglect and abuse that could be documented in any Social Service department.
What then can be seen as the different factor that has entered the lives of countless children and adolescents in recent years? This has to be recognised as the easy availability to children of gross images of violence on video …
… Thus it is not surprising that Mr Justice Morland speculated upon the part that such videos might have played in creating the degree of desensitisation to compassion that the children in the Bulger case showed – not only during their attack, but in comments like Robert’s (before he admitted the killing): ‘If I wanted to kill a baby, I would kill my own, wouldn’t I?’
Maybe it was only a discussion paper, but I found this a particularly depressing document. An ill-considered remark by the trial judge had made a minor sensation in the media and was now being given the credibility of an academic paper.
Elizabeth Newson’s case was founded on the precept that the phenomenon of killings by children had begun with Bobby and Jon, whereas, in fact, it was at least two hundred and fifty years old. There was the, by now, familiar argument that the two boys’ backgrounds were no worse, even a good deal better, than many others. Another shaky precept. And were ‘gross images of violence on video’ the ‘different factor’ in the recent lives of children? What about poverty, the sinking life raft of the Welfare State and the consistent underfunding of education?
The argument about corrupting images of sex and violence is as old as cinema itself. It’s a reasonable wish to protect children from the excesses of adult films but it is hard to accept that, without prior disturbance, children will be impelled to act out what they see on the screen.
Couldn’t we find something more pertinent to discuss?
I hope I don’t appear to be engaged on some moral crusade of my own. I’m only trying to offer a humane explanation for an act of apparent inhumanity. It is not outside us, it is within us. Bobby and Jon are human too. Small humans, just like James Bulger.
*
Since their trial the two boys have remained at the same, separate secure units where they were first held after being charged with abduction and murder. Bobby has been visited regularly by Ann and some of his brothers. He has still not had any contact with his father. Jon has had regular contact with Susan and Neil.
Though both boys are, to some extent, isolated in their units by their exceptional youth and the exceptional notoriety of their crime, they have both become part of regimes which are supposed to balance punishment with rehabilitation.
Jon’s parents are said to have had concerns about the strict, disciplined approach of his unit. Early on, the Home Office advised that Jon should only move between his living quarters and the unit’s recreational wing when accompanied by three members of staff. This has meant a restriction of his movements in a bigger institution with a more impersonal, less flexible style.
During the day Bobby can move freely from his room to the classroom and the lounge, which has table tennis and pool tables and a television and video, where older boys are usually sat watching music tapes.
Bobby has been working at carpentry in the woodwork shop and spends time in the communal kitchen, extending the range of dishes he can cook to curries, pizza and lemon meringue pies.
There are no plug sockets in the boys’ rooms and, by day, the corridor of Bobby’s unit is criss-crossed by leads that power various electrical components, including the old computer that Bobby uses for games.
Both boys have begun a therapeutic process that is eventually intended to allow them to talk openly about the killing and reach an understanding of how and why it happened. The role of therapist has fallen to Dr Susan Bailey, the consultant psychiatrist who appeared for the prosecution at the trial.
Bobby was initially unable to square the fact that someone who had appeared in court ‘against’ him was now going to be working for him. They now meet, together with a colleague of Dr Bailey, on a loose schedule of visits, the idea being that when the boys are ready to talk a therapeutic relationship will be in place for them.
The boys’ sentences are open-ended, but the law required the Home Secretary to set the first date at which they could be considered for release: the so-called tariff date, after which they will have ‘satisfied the requirements of retribution and deterrence’.
In all such cases the Home Secretary makes his decision after hearing the recommendations of the trial judge and the Lord Chief Justice and considering submissions from the detainees. There has been criticism, in the past, that a Home Secretary, who has to be re-elected, could allow political expediency to influence his decision. Bobby and Jon seemed vulnerable to this possibility: they were the objects of national loathing, there was a continuing outcry over juvenile crime and the Home Secretary, Michael Howard, was a right-wing Minister in an unpopular Conservative Government, under pressure to be ‘tough on crime’.
There was some relief, among their family and lawyers, when, in January last year, Bobby and Jon received letters from the Home Office which outlined judicial recommendations.
The trial judge had told the Home Secretary that, if the boys had been adults, he would have said the tariff should be set at 18 years. Quoting his own sentencing remarks he said that, taking into account all the appalling circumstances and the age of the defendants, eight years was ‘very, very many years’ for a ten- or eleven-year-old. They were now children. In eight years they would be young men.
The Lord Chief Justice agreed with the trial judge that a much lesser sentence should apply than in the case of adults. He thought ten years should be the tariff.
After the trial judge’s severe comments at the close of the trial there was considerable surprise that he had not proposed a longer tariff. I understand that Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, was surprised too – the wind taken out of his sails. He had been considering a tariff of 20 or 25 years and, while he was not obliged to follow the judicial recommendations, it would now be difficult to deviate from them by so great a margin.
The recommendations had been passed from the Home Office to the boys in confidence but they were made public and became news. The family of James Bulger reacted in anger and announced a public campaign to persuade Michael Howard that the boys should never be released. The Sun newspaper took this up with enthusiasm and printed a special coupon which readers could complete and send to Howard.
In mid-June the boys received a second letter from the Home Office explaining that Howard would soon be announcing his tariff decision. The letter went on to itemise all the submissions the Home Office had received:
One petition, from Ralph and Denise Bulger, containing 278,300 signatures urging that the boys should never be released; one petition from the Bulgers’ local MP, George Howarth, containing 5,900 signatures urging that the boys should serve at least 25 years; 21,281 coupons from The Sun newspaper; 1,357 sundry letters and small petitions urging a high tariff date … and 33 letters in support of the trial judge’s recommendation that the tariff date should be set at eight years.
The third, and final, letter came in July, the message inside it delivered in person to Bobby and Jon by an emissary civil servant. Howard, having taken into account ‘public concern’ over the case, among other factors, had decided that the boys should serve a minimum of 15 years as punishment before they could be considered for release.
Appeals, to the English and European Courts, are pending.